Black Hills: A Novel

by Dan Simmons

  The three old men and teenager do not understand this query at all but it’s evident in the looks they exchange that they’ve already decided that their uninvited Sioux guest is crazy.

  Paha Sapa confirms the diagnosis by laughing.

  —Never mind. I agree to pay the five dollars for the use of the tools and garage space and lights on Friday night.

  Mr. Strange Owl’s loud, wheezing voice reminds Paha Sapa of the kind of bellows that once worked in this very space when the garage was a blacksmith shop.

  —And don’t forget the price of the bearing itself, plus, of course, the dollar to Tommy for fetching it all the way from Billings.

  —Of course. Is there any place here I might be able to stay the three nights before Tommy goes to get the bearing in Billings?

  This conference among the three old and one young Cheyenne is much shorter than the earlier ones. No one in Busby, it turns out, wants to board a Sioux, Paha Sapa is told without a hint of apology, not even for cash money, but Mr. Strange Owl informs him that there is a creek just down the road with some cottonwoods if Mr. Slow Horse would like to camp there. There’ll be no charge for the campsite. But Mr. Slow Horse has to promise not to shit or piss in or near the creek, because, you know, people in Busby use that water.

  Paha Sapa makes a solemn promise to avoid shitting or pissing within fifty yards of their stream and gathers his tarps, jacket, canteen, and leather gladstone valise from the sidecar. He buys an extra loaf of bread and a flashlight from Mr. Strange Owl in the general-store side of the garage. He noted the creek bed—almost dry this time of year—and the picket line of dying cottonwoods as he went over the tiny bridge both while driving west and then when pushing the motorcycle back east earlier today. It’s not even a half-mile walk, and he has hours before sunset.

  Walking west toward the lowering sun, Paha Sapa knows in his heart that the sensible thing to do is just keep walking—hitchhike if anyone will stop for him on the Crow reservation to the west, but just keep walking if no one does. It’s only twenty-five or thirty miles to the battlefield. He can walk through the cool of the night, taking a little care to watch for snakes that come out to soak up the warmth of the dirt and gravel on the road, and be at Greasy Grass by tomorrow afternoon. He’s walked farther than that in one spell of steady day-and-night walking many, many times in his seventy-one years and in conditions far worse than this straight road in the pleasant weather so early in the Moon of the Brown Leaves.

  But for some reason, Paha Sapa can’t stand the thought of leaving Robert’s beautiful gray-with-brown-and-orange-trim-and-lettering motorcycle behind to the mercy of Mr. Strange Owl and Mr. Red Hawk and the invisible but threatening Tommy Counts the Crows. And he wonders if the Crows Tommy counts are the flying kind or the sullen reservation kind.

  You’ll be leaving the motorcycle behind somewhere in a few days anyway, says a more sensible and less sentimental part of his mind.

  Yes, somewhere. But at the battlefield. And at a place of his choosing, not at the burned-out bearing’s choosing. He’s come this far with Robert’s beloved machine, across many miles and almost twenty years of time, and he wants to travel with it the rest of the way.

  BY RIGHTS, Paha Sapa should have been restless during his three nights and three days of waiting, so close to his purpose and destination yet so stranded here near a no-place named Busby, but a perverse part of him welcomes the time spent relaxing and thinking and reading along this dried-up excuse for a creek. (What little water there is in the mostly dry streambed lies in puddles and hoofprints—someone around Busby runs cattle—and those few circles of brown stagnant water, it is obvious, have already received their share of excrement and urine. But bovine, not human, so Paha Sapa can understand Mr. Strange Owl’s and the residents of Busby’s concern. For drinking water and for his morning coffee, Paha Sapa has to hike back to the Busby store and pay Mr. Strange Owl two bits to fill his two small canteens at their pump.)

  Paha Sapa has found a sheltered place, out of sight of the highway, and rigs his ground tarp and overhead tarp so that he can quickly close up the latter when the rain comes (and his bones tell him it is coming). He makes sure that the site is up and out of the streambed itself so that there will be no surprises if the rain turns into a gully-washer. Anyone who has lived in the West for more than a week, he thinks, would take such precautions.

  This thought reminds him of the flooding everywhere that rainiest-in-his-life month of August in 1876, and with that memory comes the wave of guilt and emptiness at the loss of the Ptehinčala Huhu Canunpa, the most sacred Buffalo Calf Bone Pipe of his people. The despair and shame are as fresh as if he had lost the pipe yesterday.

  And how does he feel after this most recent failure?

  In 1925, on the recommendation of Doane Robinson, he read a poem called “The Hollow Men” by a certain T. S. Eliot. He still remembers the final two lines of that poem and they seem to fit his state of mind—

  This is the way the world ends

  Not with a bang but a whimper.

  Doane Robinson told him that the bang and whimper in the poem related to the failure of Guy Fawkes’s Gunpowder Plot, whenever that was in English history. (Suddenly he imagines Robert’s voice, the tone always enthusiastic, never pedantic, whispering excitedly—Sixteen oh five, Father. Fawkes and some friends attempted to blow up Parliament, but the barrels of gunpowder were found in the vaults under the House of Lords before Fawkes could set them off, and the final whimper was his, you see, whimpering as he was tortured. His sentence was to be tortured and hanged and drawn and quartered, the hanging first and only to the point where he was almost but not quite dead, but he cheated them from the drawing-out-his-bowels-while-he-was-still-alive part by jumping from the gallows and breaking his own neck.)

  —Thank you, Robert…

  Paha Sapa whispers to his absent son—

  —I needed that to cheer me up.

  But joke as he may, he knows that he is one of the Hollow Men now.

  Having silently promised his beloved tunkašila that he would protect the sacred Ptehinčala Huhu Canunpa with his life, he lost it instead… while fleeing some fat, flea-bitten Crows.

  Having promised Limps-a-Lot, Angry Badger, Loud Voice Hawk, and the other wičasa wakan that he would return with word of his Vision, he failed to return in time… failed even to tell them about the Vision. To this day he has never revealed the details of the Wasichu Stone Giant Vision to a single human being other than his wife.

  Having promised his beloved wife on her deathbed that he would watch over and care for their son always, swearing to her that he would make sure that Robert became educated and would be happy as a man, he allowed the boy to go into the army and then to war and to die young in a strange land among strangers, his gifts and potential untapped.

  Having promised himself that he would deny the Wasichu Stone Giants their destiny of rising from the sacred soil of the Black Hills and wiping out the buffalo while stealing the gods, past, and future of the Ikče Wičas´a and other tribes, Paha Sapa has totally failed at that as well. He couldn’t even manage to dynamite some fucking rock.

  There is nothing left to fail at.

  Or almost nothing. A week earlier, knowing that he could fail yet a final time, Paha Sapa went to Deadwood and purchased new cartridges for the Colt revolver, then test-fired twelve of them in a remote canyon. Even gunpowder, he knows, becomes weak and useless with age.

  This is the way the world ends

  Not with a bang but a whimper.

  But he is tired of whimpering. And it is past time for the bang.

  ON THURSDAY EVENING it begins to rain and by midnight it has become the downpour Paha Sapa has been warned about by his aching bones and sinews. He’s rigged the tarps well, high on a spot above the highest watermark of the old stream, the lean-to’s opening facing away from the wind, and the sweet geometry of the two tarps rigged on ropes well out from under the tall cottonwoods where lightning might strik
e or where heavy rotted-out limbs will fall at the slightest push of wind, and Paha Sapa stays comfortably dry between his blankets as the storm rages through the night.

  He’s using this last luxury of the flashlight he bought from Mr. Strange Owl—at twice the price of any flashlight—to read Henry James’s The Ambassadors. Paha Sapa has been checking this book out of the Rapid City library—doggedly, between reading other books—for almost ten years now. He simply can not get through it. It’s not just the meaning of James’s book that eludes Paha Sapa, it’s the meaning of individual sentences themselves. The story itself seems so insignificant, so overblown, so petty and obscure, that Paha Sapa has actually wondered if Henry James tried to hide his complete lack of a tale to tell behind these wandering, convoluted, grammatically and syntactically indecipherable sentences and flurries of words and paragraphs seemingly unattached to thought or human communication. Trying to decode this thing reminds Paha Sapa of his first weeks of confusion and overload while trying to learn to read under the tutelage of the Jesuits at the Deadwood tent school, especially under the patient, never-frustrated guidance of Father Pierre Marie, who—Paha Sapa now realizes with a shock—must have been only around twenty years old when he taught Paha Sapa and the other boys.

  But why, Paha Sapa asks himself as the storm attacks his tarp, has he persisted with this one unreadable novel when he’s read hundreds of others so easily? Just give it up.

  But Robert admired Henry James and loved this book, so Paha Sapa has continued checking it out of the big library in Rapid City, returning it each time with no more than a few pages conquered. His struggle to finish this book reminds Paha Sapa of what he heard about the battles in the Great War, at least before the Americans (including his son) entered the war near the end: so much life’s energy and so many artillery shells expended for such terribly small patches of murky ground gained.

  But the real problem, he thinks as he switches off the flashlight (although he could continue reading by the constant lightning flashes if he wished to), is that he still has to return the book to the library. It’s why he put it in his valise in the first place. He’s not a thief.

  Somewhere between here and the Custer battlefield, he has to find a place to buy an envelope and then find a post office. All logic dictates that Mr. Strange Owl’s store should serve both purposes out here, alone as it is in the prairie, but it does not. When Paha Sapa asked to buy a large envelope and a stamp, Mr. Strange Owl stared at him—again—as if the Sioux were crazy.

  The lightning flashes, the thunder rolls, and the creek rises, but Paha Sapa sleeps dry and dreamlessly in his well-lashed lean-to, with only the echoing whimpers of tortured Jamesian sentences to disturb his sleep.

  ON FRIDAY MORNING the storm is gone and the skies are clear, although the air feels cooler than early September. Paha Sapa packs up his camp and hangs out the tarps in the sunlight to dry while he takes a walk north along the meandering stream.

  It strikes him that his world has gotten smaller the older he’s become. When he was a boy, before Greasy Grass and the hard part of his life, Angry Badger’s tiyospaye had wandered together from the Missouri River in the east to Grandmother’s Country in the north to the Grand Tetons and west, then south along the Platte River to the Rocky Mountains, south almost to the Spanish town of Taos, east back a long loop through Kansas and Nebraska, back to the heart of the heart of the world near the Black Hills.

  Paha Sapa remembers the sight of the tiyospaye on the move, usually with several other bands for safety’s sake, the warriors ranging ahead on their ponies, the old men and the women walking, the younger children playing and ranging wide to either side of the march, the travois being pulled by the older nags and dogs. Often they would come to a grassy hilltop and see thousands of buffalo stretching off for miles. Other times they would cross a rise to see a mountain range in the mists of distance, knowing that those white peaks in summer would be their destination soon. There were no boundaries to the world of the Ikče Wičas´a then….

  “It’s because you murderous Sioux had killed or chased out all the other tribes.”

  Paha Sapa stops in surprise. The voice in his head is louder than usual.

  —I thought you’d gone away.

  “Where would I go? Why would I go? And why are you going where you’re going? Not for me, I hope. It makes no difference to me where you end things.”

  —I’m doing nothing for you, Long Hair.

  Custer’s irritating laughter echoing in his head, Paha Sapa glances over his shoulder to make sure that none of the local Northern Cheyenne are watching him talking to himself. There is only a single black cow on a nearby hill, watching with that placid, stupid, trusting expression that can only be called bovine.

  “Well, good. We were talking about how you Sioux, you peace-loving Sioux who, I’m sure historians will soon be saying if they aren’t already, fought only to defend their lands and families, used to go to war against everything that moved on two legs. And killed everything with four legs as well. Your warfare was as indiscriminate as your old habit of driving hundreds of buffalo off a cliff to enjoy a liver or two.”

  It is true, Paha Sapa thinks. He has to smile. The Indian’s enemy, this enemy, knows them—knew them—better than do their wasichu so-called intellectual friends. Every spring and summer and fall, the warriors in Angry Badger’s tiyospaye would paint themselves and ride out to go to war for no more reason than it was time to go to war. A Natural Free Human Being male without someone to fight was simply not a natural free human being. Warring against other tribes and against strangers sometimes seemed necessary, but if it wasn’t necessary, which it so often wasn’t, the fighting would have been pursued anyway. It was necessary for its own sake. It was a break from the women and their talk and the smells and sounds and banality of life in the village, in the lodge, that almost all men looked forward to. It was a test of courage and fighting ability that could be found nowhere else. Most of all, of course, it was fun.

  But even as Paha Sapa acknowledges these things to himself, he realizes that Custer is not finished with his rant.

  “When the Army called your leaders to that first peace powwow at Fort Laramie in eighteen fifty-one, you Sioux kept talking about territory you’d owned forever but which in reality you’d just taken away from the Arikara and Hidatsa and Mandan on your way west from Canada and Minnesota. You bragged about territory that had belonged to you forever but which really had belonged to the Crows and Pawnee just a few years earlier. You Sioux were a ruthless, relentless invasion machine.”

  —We didn’t take all the land away from the Cheyenne.

  “Not for want of trying, my red friend. Besides, you liked teaming up with the Cheyenne and Arapaho to kill the Pawnee and the Ponca and Oto and Missouri, all the weaker tribes.”

  —They were weak. They deserved to die or lose their lands. That was the thinking then.

  “It still is, Paha Sapa. At least among us whites. Look at that Hitler fellow you were reading about when we went to New York three years ago. He knows the price of weakness—his and his enemies’ both. But your so-called Natural Free Human Beings have lost the balls to live and die that way—through your own courage, taking what you want from those too weak to keep it. You’re all fat, slow reservation Indians now, wearing cowboy hats, working for wasichus, and waiting for handouts.”

  Paha Sapa has no reply to that. He thinks of his own decades working for the Fat Takers. He thinks of the brash, ambitious, confrontational energy that Gutzon Borglum exudes, breathes in and exhales, and that he knows in none of his own kind any longer, including himself.

  “When Mitchell and Fitzpatrick called that original eighteen fifty-one meeting at Fort Laramie, they had to deal with the Cheyenne who killed and scalped two Shoshones whom the Cheyenne had specifically given safe passage to so they could get to the council… ”

  The ghost’s voice bores on like one of the pneumatic steam-powered drills that Paha Sapa has listened to mo
st days of his life through the past five years.

  “So when Mitchell helped calm things down and convinced the Cheyenne to say they’re sorry and to pay the Shoshones their blood price of knives and blankets and tobacco and colored cloth—all stuff the Cheyenne had received from the whites as bribes just weeks earlier—the Cheyenne couldn’t help but insult the Shoshones again at the peace banquet by serving boiled dog.”

  Paha Sapa has to smile.

  —Yes, the Shoshone never developed a taste for dog.

  “But you did, didn’t you, my friend?”

  Paha Sapa remembers well the feasts when he was a boy and the joy of spooning through the kettle with the other boys, searching for the dog’s head. It was a delicacy. Just the memory makes him salivate.

  “Eaten any of your neighbors’ puppies in Keystone recently, Paha Sapa?”

  —What are you doing, Long Hair? Trying to make me angry?

  “Why would I do that? And what are you going to do if I am trying to provoke you… shoot me? Speaking of which, why the Little Big Horn? Why not here? One Montana river or creek is as good as another, isn’t it? And this way at least someone will get the use of the motorcycle. Old Mr. Strange Owl looks like a nice fellow to me… for a Northern Cheyenne, I mean. That greedy old bastard was probably there at the Little Big Horn as a greedy young bastard, fighting alongside your relatives and stealing from my brothers’ mutilated bodies on the day you all killed me.”

  Paha Sapa realizes that the ghost is trying to make him angry. He has no idea why.

  The ghost-voice continues.

  “I have a question for you, Mr. Black Hills. Why didn’t you self-proclaimed Natural Free Noble Human Beings When Others Aren’t Human At All ever rub out—or try to rub out—the Nez Percé or Flatheads or Ute or Plains Cree or Piegan or Bannock or Blackfoot?”